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A dubious advertiser’s review of the TNX Text Links Marketplace

Posted on March 30th, 2008.

There comes a time, when your website will need a little bit of link love to get a good search engine position. Very soon, I’m going to start to advertise and promote my blog. I want more people to find out about my site. There’s a plethora of advertising programs out there, and one such is the TNX Text Links Marketplace.

I’ve already mentioned that I’m a little dubious about this service. At the moment, Google is on a crusade to rid the web of paid links which affect search engine rankings. Unfortunately, this is what the TNX Marketplace is involved with. It helps advertisers buy links, and helps webmasters sell them.

TNX do however offer advice on not getting penalised by Google, but I think that trickery isn’t going to get you anywhere. I want to stay on Google’s side for as long as I possibly can.

The sign-up process

Sign-up was quick and easy, and required few details as all transactions involving money are handled by PayPal.

Appearance and usability

What can I say about the design? It’s pleasant and blue. It is a bit old-fashioned but it’s a text links service and therefore, doesn’t have to look fantastic. However, the icons which are used throughout the site are a nice touch.

Although the appearance is basic, usability is excellent.

There is a navigation menu to the left which is simple, clear and easy to use.

The site is spilt up into three distinct sections one each for, webmasters, advertisers and the affiliate program. This aids usability significantly, and makes it incredibly easy to find what you’re looking for (provided you know the section you need to be in).

At the top of the each page there is a bar showing you 3 statistics. You get information on the number of websites you have participating in the program, the number of campaigns which you have running, and the number of TNX points that you have. A nice addition to the stats bar would be the number of active links you currently have.

Setting up a text link campaign

There are 3 steps to setting up an ad camping. At first I thought it would be rather easy, but it wasn’t that simple. Even after setting up a test campaign, I don’t know exactly how many text links I’ve bought!

There is a lot of help material provided for each step, but I’d rather see a specific section for support as there seems to be titbits of help all over the place. A specific section for help information would make the campaign interface a lot cleaner.

In step 1, all you have to do is click a few boxes and name your campaign.

Step 2 is as complicated or as simple as you want. The basic ad generator is straightforward to use, but you can only create one text ad using it. The advanced generator is a good bit more complicated, but I found it an incredibly valuable tool and it allows you to construct more than one ad at a time.

I really liked the fact that you’re able to choose the exact text which is to be linked, it’s better for SEO.

The advanced generator also puts ads together for you. For example, I had three or four different keywords which I wanted to be links and it then inserted each one between my start and end statements and as a result, created 4 different links.

At the bottom of the page, after you’ve generated your link, it told me that it’s better to link to various pages within my site, but I couldn’t figure out how to do add multiple links.

In step 3, you choose how many links you want to buy on each category of site.

There are an absolute tonne of options for each step, which I think makes the process more complicated than it should be. Some preset campaigns (e.g. a set campaign to get a site a pagerank of 1) would make using the service a lot easier.

Why I’m not going to put TNX text links on my website

They’re text ads and as a result, you could get banned from Google. I know it’s not smart to live by Google, but Google’s traffic is nevertheless valuable and I don’t see the benefits in getting myself banned. If I was allowed to add the “nofollow” tag to the links, I would definitely reconsider but, it’s strictly forbidden in TNX’s TOS.

Conclusions

I think that TNX is a very useful service which can significantly cut down the time it takes to buy and sell text links. However, is it a little too late now that Google’s on a rampage? I’m not sure, but I won’t be selling the text ads on my website. I guess I’m a little paranoid! However, for those who don’t rely on Google, I’d recommend this service.

This post was a paid review. However, the views and opinions expressed were my own, honest views and opinions. I was not influenced by the payment which I received.

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